WHERE’S BATTLETECH IN MECHWARRIOR ONLINE?

On December 13, 2013, Vancouver-based developer Piranha Games, Inc. (PGI), announced the first expansion to their free-to-play shooter MechWarrior Online (MWO), the latest of a long line of digital games based on the strategic board game Battletech, first released by FASA corporation in 1984. Scheduled to be released only nine months after the game’s official launch on September 13, 2013, the expansion in itself as well as the changes it would introduce to gameplay were heavily contested in the official and fan-moderated forums of the game. Hampered by technical problems, an extremely complex copyright situation, and a problematic business model, MWO had missed deadlines for feature injection on a regular basis. Players were thus skeptical of the new promises, as some elements envisioned as core game features upon the beginning of the closed beta phase in May 2012 had not yet been implemented at the time of writing. The vocal criticism of PGI’s policies is certainly related to the fact that the developer only had two – at best – moderately successful major games to its name (Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza and the console port of Duke Nukem Forever) before taking on the long legacy of MechWarrior games. Especially the ‘founders’ who participated in the initial crowd-funding of the project by raising several million dollars have been very outspoken in their general criticism of PGI’s design decisions since the late beta phase. Discussion of the ‘Clan invasion’ event, however, connected a number of points of contention, and did so at an unprecedented scale. Within four weeks of announcing the feature and rule changes in the envisioned expansion on December 14 (Inouye, 2013), 1785 replies of lengths up to 2000 words had been posted in reaction to the design paper, and discussion in the thread continued until it was closed a week before the expansion launch (“MWO Forums: Clan Technology – A Design Perspective – Feedback,” 2013).